


Thinking of Forbidden Love

by modernlove



Category: Bob Dylan (Musician)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Drugs, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rock and Roll, Sex, or rather some comfort, references to rentboy life, suicide talk, wives conspicuously absent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 14:31:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21283259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modernlove/pseuds/modernlove
Summary: *Insert relevant lyrics of Long and Wasted Years here*
Relationships: Bob Dylan/Mike Bloomfield, Bob Dylan/Robbie Robertson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 44





	1. 1974

**Author's Note:**

> Whew okay, here we go. Heavily influenced by Robbie Robertson's Testimony and a hard glance at Levon's book and bits of Dylan stuff that refuses to leave me alone. Girlfriends/Wives/most other people aren't mentioned, so pretend they're there or not there based on your needs.

Plane rides in the winter eves. He watched out the Starship’s windows for the night sky to swirl like Van Gogh but the canvas was too dark to see and Robbie was left with this vacant, empty feeling from all that passed him by.

Air travel never normalized for Robbie. Maybe it was growing up with nothing, thinking he might never get out of town, let alone how. It didn’t make him fearful of takeoffs or landings, but he never forgot what danger lurked round the confined spaces of the hunk of hurtling metal dancing about the sky. How lucky they were just to get on the ground again. How lucky they were to live.

The Band had commandeered the front quarter of the plane, Levon and Rick palled around while Richard, bright-eyed and more than a little buzzed, entertained the hangers-on. Garth was either asleep or pretending to be. Even though he was with his closest friends and brothers, Robbie struggled to find where to fit in. Felt like a late night jam session: too many artists, not enough instruments.

Bob was in the back of the plane, by means of self-banishment. It wasn’t like he’d asked to be alone, more like he’d maneuver himself into situations when he wanted to be involved and spirit himself away once that was through. One great, lonely magician.

Robbie picked up a cocktail napkin and scribbled a bit of nothing on it: Sunset on the water / Skies are open / Seeds are drowned. He moved around, paced it out to see if he could make that mean anything or if it was another silent piece of paper to clutter up his bedside table. It seemed like it was going that direction, he folded the napkin and stuck it in his back pocket.

He’d walked by Bob not planning on having anywhere to go. But then sometimes he needed to make it easier for Bob to engage. Like in the studio when Al and everyone used to circle up to try to hone in on Bob’s vision so it wouldn’t take as long to get there. So Bob wouldn’t need to work so hard, fueled by fumes and god knows what else.

Hitting the end of the plane, Robbie suddenly faked an interest in the seams on the wall and Bob called out, “Hey Robbie,” which was a welcome rescue for both of them.

“Yeah?” he slid down in the seat next to him.

For a while Bob didn’t speak at all, he was content to have Robbie at his side. Then he swallowed back a sentence left unsaid and asked, “You got a cigarette?” 

Bob had quit before the start of the tour, for the sake of his voice and stamina. Something about not being enslaved to anything. More about the cough he couldn’t shake. But Robbie fished inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a crunched pack, handing the first cigarette that came loose to Bob.

“Thanks,” he never brought it to his mouth, he threaded it through his fingers and tapped it against the armrest until he’d come to the end of it and then turned his hand around so he could repeat the process.

There was something brewing under Bob’s skin, liquid and intense, but Robbie didn’t think he could get into it, not in this cramped space with far too many eager ears that would latch onto anything to serve their own agenda. Always at the expense of Bob.

The taps sounded out frustrated, irritated, solemn, dull, angered, upset, empty—all while maintaining the integrity of the object. Bob never looked to destroy anything but himself.

Robbie played with the pack of cigarettes to work around the tension, just how he’d sometimes fake string adjustments and drum consults when he needed to feel out Bob’s spacing between songs. He never wanted to rush him, he knew that timing intimately.

“Huh,” Robbie looked inside the pack. “That was my last one.”

“Sorry,” Bob handed the cigarette back to Robbie, and for the first time while they’d been sitting there their eyes met with a startling snap. 

Robbie brushed his fingers against Bob’s as he went to take it back, and then changed his mind. He leaned down and brought his lips to the cigarette and let Bob drop it into his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Bob whispered to him, and goosebumps tore a path up Robbie’s skin.

That word could send him back a decade or so.


	2. 1965-1966

He thought he’d learned to sleep through just about anything. Crammed in the back of the car on the way to another gig, parties of an adult nature raging in rooms on the road. Even before that, when his parents came home loud and drunk and he couldn’t feel safe behind a closed door.

But that night while he was caught in a deep sleep that felt so far away, so distant, like washing up on a forgotten shore, he awoke to someone next to him in his bed and he felt like he’d been dropped from his dream directly into a folk tale. Which only complicated things when he found it was a former folk singer in his bed.

“Hey,” Robbie squinted in the darkness. How did he know it was Bob? Something about him being in a room crept along your heart. His hair held the scent of tobacco leaves. Harmonica breath filtered, silent.

“Were you really asleep?” he asked, Bob’s hovering presence like a spiderweb Robbie had walked through long ago.

Robbie hugged the cold pillow closer. “My dream was nice.”

Like floating along the sky in its navy blue splendor. The feel of night like rippling velvet, fog traveling in sound waves.

Bob coughed his throat clear and started in on whatever he was going to say, which always felt like he’d begin mid-conversation, leaving Robbie with a handful of scrapped beginnings wound against his palm like fraying twine. “Earlier your guitar playing was really solid. It’s something else. I don’t care how they take it but I wish they’d listen more, you know?”

“Yeah,” Robbie pulled the blanket up, somehow it had fallen half off the bed. The dream was already dissipating, if he moved faster maybe he’d catch the end of it. 

“I wish they could hear you like I do. Anyway, that’s it.” Hasty sounds of rustling like he was aiming to get away.

“Okay,” and Robbie reached through the darkness and clapped his hand on Bob’s cheek, giving him a quick pat and release, only…

Only Bob followed the path of Robbie’s arm and sunk into a kiss. He kissed with a devastating hunger, a kiss so deep and long Robbie could feel his consciousness tip.

He was still asleep, wasn’t he? This was part of the dream. They broke apart and the confusion started up again, with the static fuzz of a station sign off.

“Sorry,” Bob quickly scrambled into the dark.

Robbie breathed in the air around him. The silence stretched thin and he was afraid it’d break before he had another string to swap in. He rubbed his eyes in hopes to wake up the rest of the way.

“You still there?” he finally asked.

“Part of me is,” Bob answered, his voice crackling in the cold.

Robbie gathered the blanket in his hands, still trying to work it all out. “Where’s the other part?”

“Dead and buried,” he mumbled, and there was the shaky fumblings of a hand on a loose doorknob.

“You wanna come back over?” Robbie tried.

A long pause and then Bob said, “No,” short, almost angry, with the quickest open and shut of the door so that Robbie couldn’t even get a good look at him in his escape.

So Robbie went back to bed, and was unable to recapture the dream he’d had and the one that he’d been living seemed lost forever too. By the next morning he wasn’t entirely sure that it happened at all.

#

Then they were traveling in the back of a car and Bob was staring at his own palm after a flip through a paper with a review of some half-forgotten show of his ended up with the newsprint smudged all across his hands.

Robbie looked over at him. “That the late or the early edition?”

Bob waved his hand. “Palm Sunday edition,” and the two of them broke up over a joke that was hardly worth it but somehow that made them laugh more.

“How you gonna get that off?” Nicotine made Bob’s hands filthy enough, he didn’t need any extra help.

Bob raised his hand to his mouth and went to lick it.

“No don’t, you’ll get sick.” Robbie batted the hand away and Bob smiled.

“Yeah, the words made me sick enough the first time,” he took a sharp breath in and watched Robbie. “Hey, what was that dream you were having the other night? The one you said was so nice.”

“Oh I hardly remember it now,” but now the night was alive again, reignited, and Robbie could feel the hair on the back of his neck bristle against his shirt collar.

It was like Bob was attuned to even the slightest pushback and it was a salacious thrill for him to press ahead. “What do you think it was?”

Was he talking about the dream or the rest of it? Robbie tried to walk that line, narrow and jagged as it was. “I think any dream is jumbled. It’s like when you pull your week or month of clothes out from the laundromat dryer and go to sort it, but it’s still hot so you can’t keep on one thing for too long and really you just need to organize all your stuff and make sure you didn’t lose anything.”

Bob went back to staring at his palm, if you looked close enough some words were still visible through the backwards blur. “You ever think dreams are what we want, but what we don’t know we want?”

That one seemed simple. “But I know what I want.”

Bob’s eyes took on a strange light. He turned to Robbie. “What is it you want?”

He tried not to sound too...too ambitious. Levon’s advice to him a few hours into what might have been their first long car ride together was that he could be the most driven asshole in the room but he didn’t have to talk everyone’s ear off about it. It was Levon’s kindest “shut the fuck up, kid” he’d get. But Robbie couldn’t temper his feelings with Bob. “I want to be the best guitarist I can be. I want the Hawks to be something greater than we are. I want to write songs that mean something, even if it’s just to me. To always hunger to know more in music.”

The intensity left Bob’s eyes somewhere around then. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice grabbed onto the grays in the paper and the clouds outside.

“What is it you want?” he tried though the car had stopped and Robbie knew he was about to lose him.

“To wash my hands,” he got out and re-examined the world reforming around them. “Hm,” he stared off at the windows in the closest shops but didn’t seem to look inside. “Society never forgives the dreamer.”

Robbie climbed out of the car after him. “Who said that?”

“Me,” Bob smirked.

“Who before that?” he knew it was some sort of message but he couldn’t untangle it. Bob lived to make deciphering him difficult.

Bob shrugged and worked to disappear in the crowd on the street, “Guess you’ll have to find out.”

#

Each of them had been dragging Bob around the hotel suite in fireman carries and the like in some mock staging of how they would treat a full theater evacuation until they’d topple over in a sea of laughter. One of those insane parlor games that only made sense after midnight.

Bob was easy to tote about. Only sometimes did the lack of weight weigh on Robbie and he wondered what else he was supposed to do or say. Or if this was another thing left for the aching silence.

He’d held onto every word, every goddamn word about it until Bob showed up at Robbie’s mom's place to meet her for dinner except he didn’t have any and afterwards Robbie asked if everything was ok and it was fine, sure, couldn’t be better and Robbie asked did you want something different and Bob brushed him off again until Robbie stopped him with are you just not hungry anymore and Bob looked him square in the eyes, took off his glasses and everything, and he said I need you not to ask me that, if you care about me please don’t ask again, only that was already some befouled tortured logic out of war-torn wonderland and the spell couldn’t be broken. Not that easily, not that fast.

Robbie hadn’t yet learned that this was him, that this would always be him. That it was something cemented in the tour, he hated to think it came earlier than that. Stemmed from amphetamines that all of them dabbled in, but Bob who was Frankensteined together from living too many lives at once surely absorbed the effects as a learned behavior.

Course-corrected behavior, Bob could break out of it for long stretches of time until it was almost forgotten, and then the stress would rain down in pure hellfire and there would be The Band casually munching on a good ol’ Southern breakfast fixed by Rosalynn Carter in the Governor's mansion and Bobby sitting right next to them managing to skate by on another meal. No one saw because they hardly looked.

Then Robbie would handle it, discreetly, indirectly, try to make it easier for him to come back around. And sometimes Bob fought him. And sometimes Bob fell apart and Robbie could solder him back together with song. Until he was something more than bone scraping sideways against bone. Blood mixed with bile splashed against a toilet seat. Shaking and sweaty, blind, missing bed.

He gave him love, cautious love, hidden at times, but unconditional. Then when Bob cycled out of it, he wouldn’t make promises he couldn’t keep, he wouldn’t apologize since that required acknowledging it, he’d just turn to Robbie and give him some variation of “I’m glad you’re here,” and Robbie would say, “Me too.”

Neuwirth scooped Bob up in a bridal carry and Bob screamed out, “Let the fire consume me!” as he untangled himself, fell to the floor giggling, and crawled his way to safety. Which was right next to Robbie.

Robbie stuck his arm around Bob and held him close. “See, what could you possibly worry about with us at your side?”

“Worried, naw I’m not worried.” he cupped his hands to his face. “I’m terrified,” he shouted and stumbled off to his room, turning back with a smile and a salute before closing the door.

Things broke up after that or moved on when it was discovered some famous musician was playing a set nearby that couldn’t be missed and Robbie slipped through the door to Bob’s room, knowing he hadn’t yet locked it.

The sound of the belt buckle and zipper on the way in gave him some idea of what was going on and for a second Robbie thought maybe he’d missed a girl going in.

Bob had made it halfway into the room and was up against the wall at the start of a private, solo act. He gave a brief glance over to Robbie, having clearly missed the sound of the door. “Oh,” he let out an awkward snicker. “Don’t mind us.”

“I don’t mind,” Robbie came closer.

Bob was caught between attempting to stop out of some sense of hospitality and being so starved for action or overcome by recent activity that he couldn’t be interrupted. “Just…” he tried to wave Robbie off. “We are ourselves alone.”

He didn’t know how it felt so natural, stepping into Bob, taking him into his hand and taking over, like when Levon would pull something together on drums and Robbie would find where to figure out how to play over, under, around it and complement it.

Bob looked at Robbie and the sting of how raw the moment was hit, how vulnerable he was and how he’d let Robbie see him, touch him, when their last encounter, small as it was, happened in the dark.

He wanted to find something to break the intensity, so both of them could know it was okay. That visibility didn’t require denial. He came up with shrugging and saying, “A good hand is hard to find.”

Seemed to work. Bob gave him the hint of a smile. “You read Flannery O’Connor?”

Robbie didn’t answer. If he kept quiet, maybe he could get away with seeming to know more than he did. He focused on how Bob melted against him, how his pants had made it just down to his knees, how hard his cock was glistening in Robbie’s hand.

Stroking him, trying to chase his rhythm, find out where he wanted to go. Bob’s fingernails scratching the cheap paint off the wall behind him.

“You can touch me, it’s okay.” Robbie whispered to him and one cautious hand felt along his shoulderblade. The other soon appeared and struggled to make sense of Robbie’s hair.

He watched Bob react in these tense slow changes, like photo slides in a power-drained Kodak carousel. Bob closing his eyes, biting his lip, wetting his mouth, not making any move he didn’t have to. Quiet so that no one would notice or that no one could learn anything about him. Well hidden among blank pages. But Robbie could see the whole of it building up inside him and he quickened his pace and just as he was sure he was going to hear him cry out against him and he could fill his mouth with a stolen kind of love, Bob pushed Robbie’s chest away. “Go, go,” he pushed his hand away too. “Please go.”

“You want me to go?” he hesitated to move, he didn’t want to get this wrong.

“No, I need you to go,” he choked out and in a desperate fervor moved to cover himself. “Please Robbie, get out.”

“All right,” he backed off and started to move toward the door and when nothing followed he kept going.

At the door he smelled his hand just to remember that it happened and he went to bed without touching anything else, including a guitar.

He couldn’t help but go over all the events of the night, and from further back than that before his eyes even threatened to close. When Bob crawled into his bed. When Bob asked him to come on the tour. When Robbie saw him in the studio with lightning in a bottle on “Like a Rolling Stone” and a seemingly endless source of lightning moving through him. 

The men he’d seen in clubs, the studio men who seemed to take an overly special interest in him. The boy from music class who tried to touch him in some guise of a game. As he dropped out of consciousness he decided he didn’t know how he felt, but that Bobby had a powerful hold on him and surely it was the other way around too. And no dream interfered to move him away from that thought.

#

The next morning he caught Bob on the balcony, a cup of tea warming his hands, probably keeping the whole of him together too. He doubted Bob slept at all last night, he seemed to be doing less and less of that.

“Sure is bright out,” Robbie said, watching the rays dip over rooftops, white and yellow slicing across chimneys. He looked for his sunglasses but couldn’t find them on his person.

Bob didn’t answer for a while. Then he set the tea aside and pushed up his jacket. “Hey, you see how pale my skin is?” he showed off his forearm, almost translucent in the sun.

Pale was a hard concept for Robbie. He was always too dark, too different looking for some Canadian kids whose version of a summer was a less cold winter. Then at the reservation pale was an enemy, and though his cousins and other relatives probably had some pointed gossip about that strain of white blood coursing through his veins, Six Nations held strongly onto their own.

Not really something he had to get into this early in the morning so he went with, “I’m surprised you can even appear in the daylight.”

“That’s just it. Shine a light up to my life, everything falls apart.” Bob paused. “That’s why most of me’s gotta stay in the dark.”

That statement knocked the breath out of Robbie, he leaned over on the balcony to collect more from the wind. Then when he felt strong enough, he said, “I understand.”

Bob brought the tea to his lips again and returned to the world of quiet contemplation.

Robbie turned so he could look at Bob, his elbows resting back against the balcony. He tried to voice something before he was ready, because he was sure he’d never say anything otherwise. “Something about you reminds me of the second note of a heartbeat. From the first note you get all this information, all that life coming in, blood and love climbing up the sides, and all you can do to keep things going is to close off. And everything else continues on and you have to wait for the next rush so you can turn yourself off again, for the good of all around you.”

Bob blew across the top of the tea though it could be nowhere near hot. “Whatever you do, don’t become a heart surgeon.”

Robbie faked a smile. Had he had his sunglasses, it would have been easier. His eyes always gave away too much.

The smudges on the sliding glass had some odd groupings to them and he thought about how that was probably the least messy thing when they’d leave. He felt bad for whatever contracted cleaner had to come in after them, sometimes they could be so careless, sometimes it was intentional.

Bob’s teacup clattered back against the saucer. “Neuwirth will joke about—I mean he’ll joke about anything but when it’s about this, when he jokes about queers, fairies, whatever, I feel my breath curdle in my mouth. I feel my insides bleed. Like I’m already seen. I can’t retreat to the shadows, they all went out for supper. Then when it’s about one of us, it’s worse. I think I’ll lose it right then and there and the only thing that keeps me sane is thinking about ways to off myself just so no one will ever know for sure.”

“That...doesn’t sound that sane,” he felt like he was nearing the end of a record and was going to have to drop the needle back for the bits of the song he’d missed.

“Yeah, well.” Bob got up and brushed off his pants and went back inside. “Better get away from the balcony before I throw myself off it.”

Bob kept his distance for a while. The next time Robbie caught a joke like that in full company, he immediately looked for Bob who had fallen into the regular crowd reaction. He was more skilled than he thought and in more isolated pain that he could even imagine. But Robbie didn’t know how to break through if it all would end before it began.

#

He wouldn’t realize how much of a gift the canceled flights were, giving them hours on end of detached normalcy, of unscheduled living. A modicum of freedom they could build a whole world on.

Because once they’d hit England the fun would be out and witnessing the overbooked death spiral Bob had knowingly or unknowingly locked himself in would be too much to bear. Watching Bob continue to drink from a poisoned well, cause he couldn’t help how thirsty he was.

But before the mess, before pure starvation, before drugs and drink consumed Bob even when he refused to open his mouth, before all that—there was Australia.

Everyone had cleared out having gone stir-crazy from staying in too long, a whole English-speaking foreign country and all their women to explore. Robbie and Bob had the suite, practically the entire hotel to themselves, playing guitar on Bob’s bed till their fingers bled to bone.

Bob finished walking Robbie through yet another deeply buried tune from way back. Bob’s knowledge endless, Robbie’s curiosity just the same. Then he started in on some old blues number, a few odd notes mixed in and Robbie thought he knew it a different way and showed it off.

“Hm,” Bob rubbed his mouth with his thumb. “Bloomfield said he was gonna teach me the blues. I think he failed.” And he cracked up in his own private joke.

Robbie tried to meet his smile, but by then it was already gone. It became easier to change the subject than to find where Bob had drifted to.

“You know what just occurred to me?” Robbie pointed at the doorway. “No one’s gonna knock on that door and tell us hurry up we have to be in a car or plane or on a stage in ten minutes. We can play music all day.” Quick blues riff to punctuate.

Bob’s hand backed off the chord he’d been holding. His tongue twisted against his teeth. “What if there’s other stuff I wanna do while we’re alone?”

“Then we’re home free,” Robbie took Bob’s guitar from him and his own and placed them safely aside.

Bob lit a cigarette and hopped up on the desk in his room. Robbie waited, there was something Bob wanted to share but not say and he had to let that burn through him first, as there was a chance he’d let it go instead of pushing it further down for certain injury later down the line.

So he watched Bob sit next to his typewriter, fingers tiptoeing along the keys, not pressing any down as he smoked. 

After a long exhale of smoke, Bob said, “When Albert first signed me, I thought he didn’t care one lick bout what I did, like he almost encouraged me to make the wrong choices. And then one day outta nowhere he turns to me and says, ‘Now don’t let me catch you doing any of that Little Richard shit or you’re out on your ass.’”

Robbie quickly attempted to review the lyrics to Tutti Frutti. “Is Little Richard a homosexual?”

Bob acted like he’d just been asked to name all European capitals. “I don’t know what Little Richard is, man.” he stubbed out his cigarette. “Anyway, it’s not just Albert, it’s everyone.”

If he’d have asked Bob anything music-related, he couldn't even feign an interest in what other people thought. Opinion was so far outside the scope for Bob. But this, the private, personal things, their fearless leader was anything but.

Robbie tried to brush it off, maybe Bob could too. “So fuck everybody outside this room.”

He held it for a while, then a slinking smile broke forth. “What if it’s other way around?”

He’d make it easy for him, no one else could. “Grab the curtains, I’ll get the door.” Robbie locked the door and stuck the chair below the doorknob in case a blockade was needed.

Bob drew the curtains and had just turned around to discover Robbie on his knees before him and he said, “Oh,” like he’d walked in on his own surprise party and could no longer find the door.

“Why waste time, right?” he fiddled with Bob’s belt buckle.

Bob had to take a few seconds to agree with himself. “Hard to argue,” he finally said.

“Hard here too,” Robbie mouthed Bob through his briefs before pulling his cock free and sliding it into his mouth, hearing Bob hiss through clenched teeth.

When giving head Robbie would go into his own...headspace. He saw it almost like being a locksmith. Working his way through a series of tumblers, attempting different techniques until he heard that final solid click.

Bob had to steady himself against the desk, his hands curling and tightening against the lip of it while his hips floated toward Robbie’s face, caught in a loop of sizzling snaps.

He’d never been able to quantify it before. How when Bob was created, they’d forgotten to color within the lines. And his presence could travel far outside himself. Even when cresting toward an orgasm, something that should have taken him completely out of himself, he seemed to be more in the room than ever before.

Bob knotted his hand in Robbie’s hair and let out a small moan that seemed to eat away at his throat and that was it.

Something Robbie loved about oral was that there were no follow-up questions. The results were clear enough. You played the gig, got paid, and left.

Bob had his eyes scrunched shut, maybe he didn’t want to see and wanted the darkness they didn’t have, maybe for once he was happy inside himself. Bob pursed his lips and brought Robbie to them and they fell against the bed.

He kissed to the point of oblivion, where Robbie swore in places he could see things behind his eyes as they were closed.

Bob pressed his hand against Robbie’s thigh and after a brief orbit came to rest on Robbie’s erection still trapped under his trousers. Robbie pushed up into his hand and Bob matched the pressure, slowly stroking him, listening for any break in Robbie’s breath.

Bob took time undressing Robbie. Like it was a first run edition of a book he’d already savored and he wanted to get the feel of it all before diving in again.

He’d pulled the curtain on the main event and sat back. “Aw hell, you long-limbed bastard.”

“Excuse me?” Robbie was partially offended, actually very offended, but he knew what was transpiring.

“Nothing,” he threw his hands in the air. “You’ve won the contest. Just know I’m not putting my mouth around that tonight cause I don’t want them to find out I died choking on your dick.”

Robbie laughed so hard he started to roll off the bed. For a second there he almost did till Bob pulled him back and kissed him again as he encircled Robbie’s cock with his hand.

He faked a bit of ignorance, maybe he thought that was what Robbie wanted: how to take it, where to go with it. Sooner or later he understood, Bob wanted to be instructed. He needed to hear the demand from the other side so he knew someone else was there with him. Their desires mixing with his own.

Robbie leaned down to get a good look at Bob’s handiwork. “I’m not gonna lie, your fingernails terrify me right now. That’s gonna hurt.”

A half smile slid up the side of Bob’s face. “Nah, I don’t hurt nobody but myself.”

The pulse in Bob’s hand seemed to match the volcanic throb that bellowed deep inside Robbie. Bob’s breath bouncing against the side of Robbie’s neck, the way it stuttered, catching every snap of pleasure making it his own.

“I—” he twisted against Bob and Bob hooked his leg around him and gripped him tight. The smell of sex hung about them and Robbie licked the sweat off Bob’s neck just to know what he tasted like and Bob chased it with a kiss, tongue about puncturing Robbie’s mouth and all Robbie was able to get out was, “Fuck I’m gonna come all over you,” against lips and teeth and tongue and then he was gone, really gone, and Bob never left his side, rubbing the evidence of what transpired against them up his chest like it was his new chameleon skin.

Afterwards wrapped among the bedsheets, a lone finger of Bob’s continued to explore, along Robbie’s arm, across his side. Did he want to memorize every angle? Did he want to sign his name in the wet cement so Robbie would be marked forever? Did he want to make sure he was still in the room, afraid that Robbie would leave him?

“Hm?” Robbie tried, as anything more seemed too direct or too cliche. 

Bob pulled his hand away, his voice rang hollow against the rickety creak of rusted bedsprings. “What’s funny is Albert doesn’t know what I did before he found me. When I had no home. When I was starving. Needed money more than...” the rest of the sentence seemed too far to reach.

“What did you do?” Robbie asked before he realized he never ever wanted to know.

Bob gave him a wink that barely cut through the sorrow. “Gotta keep some mystery or else you’ll stop coming around.”

Robbie let out the breath he’d been holding in a grateful huff. Lies, half-lies, and truths, all that Bob could build on would drive any man insane. When the impossible turned real, it was hard to look away.

The world outside their door returned to life, noise encroaching their privacy, their safety.

“We should—” Robbie started.

“Ten minutes,” he stretched and kissed a line down Robbie's ribs, across his stomach. “Five minutes even.”

The guy was herded half his life and never once felt rushed. Robbie readied himself to shove him out of bed. “For what?”

Bob tried to find a home there against Robbie’s skin. A smile slipped through. “To live an eternity,”

“Bob? Bobby? You around?” A known but unknown voice called from the distance.

His moan of complaint was filled with such innocence and pain, like he was being ripped away from the only thing he’d ever known.

Robbie pulled him up beside him. “Go take a shower, I’ll cover.”

He blinked. “Why?”

Robbie told him the truth. “Cause I’m better at lying about this.”

“My whole life is a lie, why should it matter now?” he grumbled.

“Let me do this for you,” he held him by the shoulders hoping the direction would stick. God help him, he didn’t care one bit about what happened to him but he needed to protect Bob. “Go take a long shower, then later ask me who the girl was I had in your room. Promise?”

With an exhausted sigh Bob got out of bed and scooped up his clothes, retreating to the bathroom. He stopped at the door and shared a look of thanks and deep regret.

Later he never even had to fake the ask, because the others were all too interested to relay the fairy tale Bob’s way. And Bob half listened as he attempted to hand roll the same cigarette five times. After that he just gave up.


	3. 1974

With the hotel arrival, there was the honorary dispersing of keys. Bob got two and with some busker street magic running through his veins, palmed one and produced a fake yawn and stretch to quickly drop the other into Robbie’s hand.

That old black magic ain’t what it used to be, Robbie thought in cobbled together songs and pretended not to notice how Rick had caught onto the whole operation and was eyeing Robbie for more explanation.

He shuffled to the back of the pack and asked Levon a nonsense question about kick drum tension he figured he’d have a four paragraph answer to. He was wrong, it was more like nine.

#

Robbie liked it best when The Band became itself again, an insular unit of love and brotherhood ready to show the world something they’d never seen before. They were together like before, huddled in a hotel room, shooting the shit about the gigs, the set list, the boss or friend or honorary band mate just down the hall.

“You think he’s happy with the tour?” Levon fished some ice out of the bottom of a glass.

“Pfft,” Robbie deflected once he realized the question was meant for him. “Who’s happy?”

“Me, I’m happy.” Richard raised his glass.

“Seems like a mighty big favor, this and the album. I wouldn’t know how to pay him back, ain’t got that kinda money.” Levon got the last bit of ice out and stuck it in his mouth. “Garth?”

Garth had been cleaning out some glass tubes that were surely instrument related and he answered with a startled “Yes?” but it turned out no one had follow-up questions for him.

“Well,” Levon got up to grab another drink. “At least we got our own shit we can play. And I get that sonofabitch’s rhythm now, for the most part.”

Rick licked and dipped a cigarette at the end of a line of coke before Richard snorted the rest up and gave a curious glance toward Robbie. “I think the only person who gets Bob is Robbie.”

With that kind of direct scrutiny and the others finding their way to agreeing with Rick, Robbie managed to make his escape out the door because an absence was easier than answers.

Levon was right, Bob didn’t have to agree to half the shit he’d done for The Band lately. Why did he bother, when he could work just as well on his own? Because he liked helping out The Band? Because he loved having a band? Because he loved…

Robbie’s breath stuck in his throat. He fumbled to find the right hotel key, the outline of it burning in his hand the more steps he took.

He thought of something Bob said to him long ago out in Woodstock, equal parts amazed and infuriated, he said, “What gets me, man, is you don’t have to be here.” 

Covered about a hundred things in it, but the heart of it was Robbie could live with or without Bob and the reverse was muddier than the boots Bob had tracked into his house. Neither of them had a good response to it, then or since, so Bob kept walking and all Robbie had to contend with were his footprints.

Robbie shoved the key in the door and opened it. He came into the room just as Bob walked out of the bathroom, steam rolling out beside him, towel tied around his waist.

“Oh,” Bob said and turned around and went back into the bathroom. Robbie sat on the bed and waited. About ten seconds later Bob walked back out and explained. “My clothes are out here.”

He couldn’t be more awkward if he tried. Robbie smiled, “You realize you’re getting dressed to get undressed in a few minutes.”

Bob considered it. Then he said, “I need more than skin to feel safe,” and retreated to the bathroom with the clothes he needed.

He came back dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and he collapsed in a chair. “It’s shit,” he pulled a cigarette loose from a stray pack and lit it. “It’s fun, but it’s shit. I dunno, what do you think?”

He was talking about the tour. “Well—"

“Fuck, I quit!” he stabbed the cigarette out on the table and threw the pack aside and covered his face with his hand.

“Hey you forgot, it gets real intense out there.” It was hard for Bob to give it up, pulling away something that had been there for so long. But sometimes Robbie thought that like some deranged scientist, Bob was always looking to find what he could live without and strip it away, until there was nothing. Until he was nothing. God, he ought to talk about something else. “There are times when I think I’m gonna lose it. I feel like I’m holding a dam together with The Band and I’m running out of fingers.”

Bob lifted his head out of his hand. “Gotta move onto toes.”

“Yeah what then?”

“Tongue.”

“And then?”

“You’ve got one more good option but I wouldn’t go stickin’ it in a dam.” he laughed.

“Yeah that’s valuable property.” Robbie fell back onto the bed and soon Bob crawled over next to him, fingers fondling each point and snap of Robbie’s jacket and shirt. There were times when being with Bob felt so right Robbie refused to believe they actually belonged to him. The memories just stories someone else told to him and he agreed to remember them. Maybe he was afraid to take ownership of something so chaotic, even in its most neutral form. “You know what I’m thinking?” he eventually asked.

“William S. Burroughs ain’t all he’s cracked up to be.” Bob said.

“What? No.”

“It’s okay if you think that, I won’t judge. I won’t tell him you think that.” At least he was entertained by his own jokes.

“No stop,” he smacked him in the chest. “I just keep thinking how crazy this all is. That for a whole segment of the show we do exactly what they could have gotten eight, nine years ago and they cheer instead of boo.”

No one had said it to him yet, Robbie was sure of it. Or no one had bothered to express it in the way where it really got to Bob, and from the way he took it full-force, Robbie realized this was at least part of his trouble on the plane.

“I hate it,” he admitted.

“You hate this tour,” Robbie tried to understand, tried not to be heartbroken by the words.

It was more than that, Bob sat up. “I hate that it’s the same.”

Not the crowd reaction, not the set list, was it venue hopping? “Private planes and huge stadiums aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

He shook his head. “For as much as I’ve changed, I haven’t. I’m still sliding you a key and everybody fakes like they don’t know.”

Oh. Oh it was that. Inky pools of regret inside him stirring from inaction. There were no words.

He linked his arms around Bob and held onto him. “It’s none of their business.”

Bob stared at the pack of cigarettes he’d thrown across the floor, Robbie couldn’t tell if he wanted to pick them back up or grind them into dust. “I thought I’d be different by now, is all.”

He tried to console him, but that kind of talk never took hold with Bob. “Only Rick saw this one and I’m sure he thinks this is a drug exchange. That’s usually where his head is. And no one needs to worry about what happens in this room.”

“Suppose,” Bob started, but he wasn’t ready to go on. Robbie leaned against him harder, breathed life back in him, on he went. “Suppose I don’t want to be confined to a room.”

“Well,” Robbie sighed, he dug his head into Bob’s shoulder, ear snug against the cords in Bob’s neck but no pulse echoed back to him. “It’d be a lot to take on.”

What did he want, did he want a yes? Did he want Robbie to tell him what to do? Advice wasn’t something Bob usually looked for. God, what if he wanted Robbie to tell him no? Like hell was he going to be that person. Or another one of those people in his life.

Robbie straightened up and took Bob by the chin and brought them face to face. “But Bob, if there’s anyone I’d know who’d be up for a challenge…”

Bob swallowed, his voice came out dry and scratchy. “Hey, is it okay if we don’t do anything?” He quickly amended with, “Tonight.”

“Of course,” Whatever that was just got packed in a box, shuffled deep into storage. And Robbie would forever have the feeling that he’d almost gotten there. The chord could have been completed if only his pinky finger moved a little faster. Instead it was close but entirely the wrong sound.

“Thanks,” Bob dragged his foot along the carpet, it made a line across the floor which he brushed away. “This whole thing has me turned around.”

Robbie pulled him across the bed and they lay there, he watched the breath funnel through Bob in the rise and fall of his small chest while Bob cast his eyes on a thousand hidden designs in the ceiling.

“They did give me drugs, I dunno why. Rick can have em.” he glanced at Robbie. “If you want the cover.”

“I don’t want to be anybody’s pack mule or even masquerade as one. That’s one of the things that scares me, being out on the road like this. That someday we’re going to go too far and be found out.”

“Yeah that kind of fear can eat clear through a fella,” Bob said, and Robbie understood how he was talking about the same thing and something else all at once.

“Thanks anyway,” he said, though he didn’t mean it and later realized what a glimpse that would have been, to see what people thought Bob needed but that he had no interest in. Or if he kept some pharmaceutical catalogue for wise men bringing gifts.

Bob feathered his fingers through Robbie’s hair. “I like your hair like this, long.”

He never knew what to say to things like that. “It’s been like this for a while.”

Bob cradled Robbie’s head in his hands. “It’s thick too, you could drive a truck through here and not see it for eight days.”

“What?” he laughed.

Bob pressed his lips to the part in Robbie’s hair and breathed. “When you’re onstage in the middle of a solo, like a really hot one, sometimes I’ll look over and I don’t know if I want to be you or fuck you.”

Robbie pulled away. “You don’t mean that.”

Bob faked or felt some level of injury. “I mean everything I say or else I wouldn’t say it.”

“But I’m no one, I’m nothing you’d want,” he’d said it to just be polite, demur, but it came to be too much, too real to take back.

Bob narrowed his eyes, eyes that pierced through to the absolute center of Robbie. His guarded walls of shrapnel and steel no match for an avalanche of untempered honesty. “I care very deeply for you, to the depths of my soul. You’re the only one I want. That I’ve ever wanted.”

No one spoke like this. No one thought in poetry-laced soundwaves. “God, who were you before I met you?”

That question ran along a downed power line, you could see Bob take the hit. “Someone used but not loved. A mistreated malcontent. Feeling exposed, diseased, terrified.” A quirk of his eyebrows. “Wish you knew me when, huh?”

He didn’t want to say some of that hadn’t changed, he didn’t want to hurt him more. So Robbie ran his thumb just under Bob’s lips. “I wish I was there to change your mind.”

Bob kissed him and didn’t let go. Then when he stopped to take a breath, he giggled. “Aw shit, I said I didn’t want anything but part of me decided otherwise.”

“Is it the part that shouldn’t be stuck in a dam?”

“Yeah,” Bob whispered.

“Yeah,” Robbie whispered back.

He brought his hand down to feel that growing stiffness and guided his body to it. The music of Bob’s sighs tearing at Robbie’s ears. Hips rocking in expansive motion, Bob letting it course through him. Speakers turned toward each other blasting the same notes, the purr of the bass, rapid squeals of feedback.

“Did you shower just for me?” he breathed in Bob’s ear.

“What?” Bob tilted his head back, Robbie’s tongue probed deeper.

“I said,” he growled. “Did you shower just for me, slut?”

“Oh uh—um, yes.” he was delighted by the turn.

“Good, I want you clean,” he pinned him to the bed. “Cause what I’m about to do to you is downright filthy.”

Bob’s throat about collapsed from the escaping groan and Robbie knew he’d got him. This was what he wanted, something otherworldly, to bring him out of himself.

He flipped Bob onto his stomach and stripped his lower half of clothes. For a moment Bob was going to climb off the bed, maybe to grab the light, but Robbie scooped him up and tossed him back onto the bed and there he stayed.

He presented two fingers to Bob which he sucked, tongue hungrily lapping up the sides, teeth gnawing at the bottom. Robbie took back possession of his fingers when he thought he might lose them.

Robbie gave Bob’s cock a squeeze and the punctuation that elicited almost made him stick around. Bob’s cock dripping and hard.

“Got another take of that tune?” Robbie spoke against Bob’s skin, free hand hovering at his cock but not taking hold of it.

Bob licked his lips. “I swear to god if I come just from the sound of your voice, I ain’t gonna live it down.”

“Mm, I like a good challenge,” he brought his hovering hand to Bob’s hip and clamped down. “But maybe I’ll save that one. In fact, how about this? How about I wait till we’re onstage in a break between songs and with a few choice words you’re creaming your jeans in front of a crowd of thousands.”

“Fuck me,” Bob choked out. He couldn’t even hold his head up anymore, any resolve he had left had disintegrated.

“So ordered,” Robbie guided himself and Bob’s back end into position. His fingers now wet and slick started the slow plunge inside Bob, scissoring him open.

It didn’t take long for things to feel so enticing, the sound of pleasure drawing near that he bent down, spreading Bob further, sliding his fingers open, and he stuck his tongue inside him.

“What the—oh shit,” he moaned caught between bracing himself and touching himself. Robbie’s tongue moved faster curling around him teasing licks and curious changes in direction.

“I’m gonna nut from—oh god.” his laugh breathy and helpless.

Robbie could feel things relax around him and tighten around his legs, Bob groaning like something had finally filled the pit of his empty stomach, Robbie moved his tongue quicker in a maddening pulse and he pushed his fingers in deeper, bending along until they hit—

“Fuck oh fucking shit,” Bob came over the sheets and collapsed into them.

Robbie pulled off his own clothes to crawl up next to Bob and draw him close and ride his wave of aftershocks.

Bob pawed at Robbie’s chest, his whole self still tied up in intense bliss. “What was that?”

He didn’t have an explanation, so he offered up, “People kiss your ass on a regular basis, I thought it was only fair.”

He laughed softly. “Aw man, I think I blacked out.” he kissed Robbie on the forehead and brushed away his hair. Then when he recovered a bit, Bob climbed down Robbie’s frame.

The reciprocal qualities of sex were still foreign to him. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Hell I know I don’t have to, I want to.” Bob didn’t have time for anything that slowed him down. He cupped the base of Robbie’s shaft and brought his mouth down around it.

Robbie leaned back and drifted away. For as much as he wanted to strike out on his own, Bob liked to be led. So Robbie ran his fingers through Bob’s hair and would press against him when things felt too good for words, when Bob’s tongue flicked across the top and the whole of him felt warm and wet.

He got caught thinking about a time forever and a half ago at Robbie’s apartment when they were listening to records, smoking, laughing, singing, and Robbie slid his hands into Bob’s back pockets, to hold him close, to keep him in the room, and Bob reached up Robbie's back and suddenly they were locked in this slow dance step and together they were whole, complete. The way Bob kissed, Robbie remembered, it was just how he kissed in the dark.

Robbie held on that part of the memory, because the next sounds were keys against the locks and Rick’s drunk ass taking forever to get inside. How Bob looked as he stripped himself from Robbie’s side and stuck at a safe distance, fingers prying under his sunglasses to pinch his eyes closed, calculating the amount of time he’d need to loiter to avoid a suspicious exit.

Rewind the tape, back to their moments alone. When Bob could touch Robbie’s face and see all that he kept behind it. When Bob left his masks hanging with the hats by the door and Robbie could love the purest form of him.

“Mm,” Bob hummed against him and the vibration just about shattered Robbie’s skin. 

He couldn’t warn him, he came hard and fast and Bob swallowed him down. Robbie gasped for fresh air while Bob went ahead and gave the tip of Robbie’s dick a goodbye kiss as he left it, just to catch the reverb and he wasn’t disappointed.

#

Sometime in the night after they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms, Robbie woke up to find Bob at the window. Looked like he’d been standing there for a while, face close to the glass, a hand absently pulling on the drapes. He looked back to Robbie, tears staining his eyes. “Maybe things are better left unsaid.”

“How do you mean?” he sat up, sleep now the furthest thing from his brain.

Bob wandered back into the bathroom. He called out, “You know, they shoot horses.”

Whatever it was couldn’t be mended. He’d closed himself off again. It wasn’t something Robbie could fix and he could read a room well enough to know when an encore wasn’t needed and it was late enough not to linger so on that non-sequitur he quietly left, not even putting his shoes on till he’d made it halfway down the hall. The second key to the room left stranded on Bob’s bedside table.

It wasn’t until he caught up with the guys that he’d learned about the beating that was broken up just outside their hotel that night, the blood spilling out to the streets. Practically had to tie Levon down so he wasn’t running out there, cracking jaws and bloodying noses to save a guy’s skin.

You could still see the remnants the next day. Dried blood on pavement, some brightly colored discarded hairpiece in the gutter. He didn’t hear about it again until years later when he caught some lyrics of Bob’s about beating the devil out of a guy wearing a powder blue wig, and he remembered the real horror ever-present infecting their lives.

Bob could let a lot of things go, but he could never forget the feeling. And Robbie felt like he fell into that category of Bob’s as well, but he didn’t know how to take it.


	4. 1975

Robbie had come to New York to remind himself of Tin Pan Alley, get a feel for the lost art of songwriting, it seemed buried under the bustling pace of the modern world and all its problems.

And some part of him had been stranded on the streets of New York long ago, cast aside or perhaps unused. Lyrics quashed by passing subway train, spirit mangled by the rest.

Of course there was someone from that time who was hard to ignore, so hard to let go of that days went by where Robbie believed they didn’t exist outside of each other. That once one of them left the room the other powered down, or ceased to exist. Later he learned Bob was only dreaming that were true and was waiting for his own body to disappear.

Robbie walked those alleys and along sides of buildings to contend with those ghosts. And found one partially of his own making gamboling about.

They spotted each other out on the streets of New York like something out of the movies Robbie lived by.

“You!” Bob ran over and tried to pick him up, the smile on his face about a mile long. “What are you doing here?”

He was only about a foot off the ground, but Bob’s bright exuberance could have carried them both away. “What are you—put me down.” Robbie wriggled out of his hold, but by then they were laughing so hard they needed to lean against a parking meter just to stay upright.

Robbie clapped his hands on Bob’s cheeks, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Bob did the same to Robbie. “Where are you going?”

Robbie shrugged. “Wherever you’re going.”

Bob brought him to his Greenwich apartment and fixed tea. Then drank most of it while he sat and stared at Robbie in a state of pure glee from across the room. It was like he was some zookeeper who’d caged his missing animal and he just wanted to observe and enjoy the capture.

Robbie talked him through the latest misadventures with The Band. Then he struggled to explain the legal things his uncle was going through, and once that was through ended up giving him a play by play of the last four gigs and relayed any interactions with fellow musicians, all to this intensely curious blank slate.

“But what are you doing now?” he tried.

Bob lifted himself out of his teacup. “Do you remember the nights in this city? Alive, free. Culture knocking down the door. Every night we spent together: music, poetry, the works.”

“Sure,” those nights he never forgot, those nights he kept hidden away. A little flask of fire to keep him warm in the bitter cold.

Bob’s eyes brightened. “I want to distill that, I want to live it every night.”

“With who?” He felt the replacement down in his bones, he tried to let it go unseen.

But it was bigger than that, Bob stood up. “With anybody that gets it. Cause it’s not just gonna be any tour, man. Small venues, forgotten towns, filled with outcasts and misfits who long to get away. So when we stake that big top tent, they’re gonna ask themselves “why here?” And they might ask “why us?” But by the end of it when the curtain falls, the right people, the ones who this is for, they’re gonna understand and they’ll never have to question themselves again.”

“Wow,” Robbie could already feel that current going through him.

“Something like that anyway,” he lit a French cigarette with the burner as he waited for the next pot of tea he stuck on to boil. “So stick around, later I’m gonna try to drum up a ragtag band of traveling minstrels.”

“Of course,” Robbie easily agreed to that plan. “What did you want to get up to beforehand?”

Bob’s shy smile said it all.

Robbie started toward the bed, open floor plans of New York apartments made temptation easy. He looked over to Bob and grinned. “Don’t make me come get you.”

Bob snapped the stove off and dived back into Robbie’s arms. They crashed onto the bed and in that football tackle of a move, Robbie somehow had knocked the wind out of Bob.

He wheezed into the sheets, he couldn’t catch his breath. His eyes didn’t seem to fit in his skull.

“You okay?” Robbie half-climbed off of him. 

Bob nodded and kickstarted his lungs back up with a few sharp breaths.

“I swear I’m not trying to kill you,” Robbie said.

Bob waved his hand at Robbie’s face. “I’ve got that part covered.”

Let him mean cigarettes, a general dying for the art, let it all be a joke, like the early days when he barely meant half of what he said. Bob was a master at lighthearted dark humor, but there were times when Robbie’s protective side caught the crux of it. 

He missed the motorcycle accident but caught him a few weeks later when he was emptying the bottles of pain pills into his mouth and Robbie had to wrestle Bob to the ground and not further injure him while saving his life. Pills scraped off his tongue, forced out of his weak stomach, embedded shards of more along their skin. Robbie held him on the floor of that bathroom as Bob began to cry, though he swore he never did and Robbie cried too because he couldn’t see a light to guide them out.

He’d catch the far off look in his eye when he held a razor to his neck and pause or when handling kitchen knives, switchblades some roadie might be showing off. When Robbie was able to, he’d force the break in that curious concentration. Bob couldn’t define those moments other to say that he didn’t trust himself and that Robbie shouldn’t either.

Then the missed meals, times he’d get dizzy walking a few feet. When he’d faint in the dressing room, during sound check, somehow never during a show even though Robbie gritted his teeth through some nights and positioned himself behind his wavering body in case of any sudden falls. And Bob would look at him with sunken eyes and whitewashed skin, no longer able to feel where his withered heartbeat began.

But maybe what most got to him the most was when he’d look at Robbie in the middle of the night with questions like, “If I was gone tomorrow, you’d be okay, right?” And Robbie would say no and Bob would give him a closer look and say, “Nah, I think you’d be fine.”

“I’m here,” Bob kissed Robbie’s cheek, then his lips. “Call off the dramatics.”

Robbie shook his head to get the time and place straight. “I get lost in you sometimes.”

Bob searched Robbie's eyes, his own turning far darker in the strain. “I hope to god you find me.”

It should have been spirited fun, how on earth did they get to this point? He was so sure right then that Bob could see into Robbie’s mind and had been horrified by the memory of himself. The only thing Robbie could do was change the tune, growl out the low notes till he was no longer playing on the board.

He positioned himself back on top and slid his hips against Bob’s, feeding him a rhythm he could hardly match. Erratic even for him. Grinding like the bending of strings: enough pressure, a push to one side, and a whole other caramel-coated sound came out.

Bob hugged him close, hands twisting, torn by wanting to spread every direction at once. He writhed under Robbie and made a noise like this contact alone was going to get him off, his cock hard and demanding, digging into Robbie’s inner thigh, aching for more, craving it. Bob’s body falling out of tempo and out of time.

How long had it been since Bob had love? How long was it since they’d seen each other last? Maybe those things were one and the same.

“What do you want?” Robbie breathed against Bob’s neck.

Bob said, “To put you into words.”

Robbie touched his face, how sharp it seemed. How distant. “What do you want from me?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “Promises that can’t be kept.”

Robbie scoffed, “All right, I’ll have to fuck the answers of your riddles out of you.”

“That’s a good start,” he liked that enough to hide his smile.

They fell side by side on the bed, stripping and shimmying out of every bit of clothing that kept them apart and then they came together, skin on glorious skin, lightning fusion, street traffic and car horns heard clear through the window, everything else a wondrous blur.

Robbie stroked Bob in time with himself, then he brought Bob’s hand into the mix and they were completely dependent on each other in this dance of desire.

Robbie raked his teeth over Bob’s shoulder, their legs entwined, Bob’s hips bucking as he forgot all phrasing for words like yes, faster, slower, stop, and resorted to gasps and huffs for air that broke over octaves and kisses that forgot to end until Robbie snuffed them out.

Quick now, at a pace that seemed impossible to keep up. Robbie pressed against him and said “I’m gonna come, I want you to come with me. Can you do that, Bobby? Can you do that?”

There was a furious sort of nod and they were there, and Robbie could finally taste the air around them, and Bob had cried out like he’d been scorched to his very soul. Spilled seed sticky and warm between them.

Robbie got up first and held out his hands for Bob to take, Bob didn’t hesitate to grab them. With a little help on the directions, Robbie brought Bob into the shower and they washed each other clean. Or as much as they could.

Robbie felt along the shower ledge. “How do you not have soap, or shampoo, or anything?”

Bob shrugged, maneuvering back into the steam and the flow of hot water. “I forget stuff.”

“But not me, right?” Robbie pulled him back into his arms, hands running up the length of Bob’s back, feeling every square inch of perfectly soaked skin.

“Never you,” his head rested perfectly at Robbie’s collarbone.

Robbie squeezed him tight and a second act started up then and there. Kisses and licks to slick bodies, Robbie pushing Bob up against the shower wall, legs spread apart, sensitive skin reviving to painful erections once more, crashing and gliding against each other, Bob showing a far better grasp of the English language than before when he cried out “Cold, cold!” because they’d either knocked the faucet out of alignment or the water heater called time out, but by then they were laughing so hard, they’d tumbled out of the shower and made love on the towels.

#

Witnessing the avalanche of talent in Gerde’s Folk City was astounding. Like being swept away in a marathon race and finding yourself miles down the road in a neighborhood you hardly recognized. The night held the kind of fevered excitement that always bubbled up around Bob.

Bob’s poker face was one of the best. He didn’t want to do straight up or down, yes or no on his friends, he wasn’t interested in hurting anyone’s feelings. If something on the stage was particularly stunning, he’d sneak his hand over to Robbie’s under the table or behind the chairs and give it a squeeze. Robbie used those precious half-seconds for a sweet caress, fingers trickling like rain across his palm. At some point they stopped making the move and stayed together, hands clasped, hidden among the madness.

And wasn’t that the most striking side of kismet: that the night Bob was in the midst of creating for others was once again alive for them tonight?

When it was over, Robbie ducked out with Bob. They walked the sidewalk free from the would-be talent and aspiring entourage. The crowd had thinned out or could have turned the other direction. Bob probably prided himself on being hard to follow.

“Man,” Robbie sought out the right words, he didn’t have them. “I’m glad I’m not in the running.”

“Be easier if you were,” the twinkle in Bob’s eyes said that there would always be space for him, onstage and in Bob’s bunk on the bus.

Robbie tried not to be swayed by it. “You know you’ve got your pick of some of the most talented people on earth there.”

Bob was unfazed. “I’m more interested in those who will understand the journey.”

They walked past an all-night diner. Bob paused against the windowpane, fingernails scratching at curling posters. Robbie figured he’d just gone down a time tunnel to Bob’s earliest days in New York, hunger clawing at his insides when he couldn’t afford to eat. The darker memories left covered for both their sakes. Or perhaps it was the later problems delaying him: hungry and unable to eat, or was it unwilling?

Robbie pulled him away from the window and they walked down the street, slower than before. “I’ll admit, if I had understood what I was getting into on those first couple of shows, I might not have signed up so eagerly.”

Bob listened back on it once or twice as he thumbed his lips. Then he said, “I lied to you.”

“What?” More accurate night have been “What about?” since so much hid in Bob’s landfill of lies, but he maintained a sobering amount of honesty with Robbie.

“Back then, I lied to you on why I wanted you on the tour. I said the Hawks were the best band and no one else can play like you and it was the exact sound I wanted. That’s true enough, but the whole truth is from the moment I saw you at Columbia standing with Mississippi John Hurt I fell so completely for you there was no one else in the world from that moment on.”

He stopped mid-step and could move no further. “Bobby…”

“Yeah all right,” Bob skated backwards on his heels. “Drink it up, cause I’m never going to admit to that again.”

“Wait, let me hear it once more.” Robbie reached out after him.

“Nope,” Bob turned back around, stealing away with his wide grin.

“Music in the club was too loud, it blew out my eardrums cause I don’t think I heard you clearly.” he pointed at his ears, not that Bob was looking.

“Too late,” he sped up down the street.

“Where are you going?” Robbie had to jog after him and Bob broke out into a run, his only hindrances were his short legs and his stream of giggles.

Robbie chased him and quickly caught up, dragging him to the cavern of an abandoned building where he pressed him against the doorway and kissed him easy and slow.

Bob rubbed against him, fingers climbing the buttons of Robbie’s shirt, fighting to go deeper. “It’s like stardust in my hands,” he said.

At first Robbie thought he was talking about the night or the gig he was casting or even the trash piled up near them and all too late in a dumbstruck haze he realized it was about him.

Bob kissed him hard and broke it with staggered breath and a fierce, almost delirious glance toward the neon-tamed night sky. “The taste of moonlight shimmering across a dark ocean. Robbie, I love y—”

Robbie slammed his mouth against Bob’s to shut him up, to blanket the powerful words with a tongue down his throat. Not that he didn’t want to hear it, but he was afraid of where it would lead. Bob was endless, Robbie only caught him at station breaks.

Shrieks from the streets, hyena laughter cutting and callous. “Get a load of the faggots. Oooh, hello ladies.” Another shouted, “Come here, I’ll give you something to suck on.” Lastly the scream of “Die faggot scum!” with a rock crashing through the closest window seemed to complete the picture.

Bob froze against Robbie’s skin, Robbie held him tight. He felt time slow up and tear round the edges. Funny, he’d spent years in New York and this was the first time he ever truly felt the danger. Hardly the mugging he’d been promised when he first moved there.

Whoever they were, they kept walking. Robbie tuned his ear to the sound of their footsteps till they were far off and no longer frightening. Goons like that in the Village, someone was bound to kick their ass.

Robbie let go of the breath he was holding, his ribs hurt from the pressure. “They’re gone,” he said it aloud to reassure both of them.

Bob still wasn’t moving. He’d projected straight out from under him, all that was left was bones.

Robbie suddenly realized the point of all those minders: managers, agents, Neuwirth. They kept Bob out of trouble, but more importantly they kept him away from it. Hundreds of boxing lessons under his belt, he wasn’t strong enough for a direct hit. Not this kind.

“Hey,” Robbie ran his thumb over Bob’s cheek. “We’ve had worse hecklers. Those kids out there were mean but harmless.” he tried to dig in, get to the core of it. “They didn’t get a good look, they wouldn’t have recognized you.”

Bob blinked a few times, he’d just come back to himself. “That’s not what hurts right now.”

“Come on,” Robbie tugged on his arm. “Let’s go home.”

Bob pushed him away. “I belong here, among the garbage and the filth.”

“No, c'mon man,” he tried to laugh it off, surely Bob could too.

“I’m trash,” he hit the enunciation hard. “That’s all there is to it.”

“All right, you can stay,” Robbie backed off and put his hands in his pockets. “But they’re running late night garbage these days and to make ends meet, I've taken a few shifts as a garbage man.”

Bob squinted. “What O. Henry tale are you spinning me right now?”

“I’ll admit it’s not my best,” Robbie gave him a small smile.

“No,” Bob tried to match it, he fell short.

Bob could express so much of himself through music, lyrics, words spit out on the page with burning truths. But so much was left unsaid.

It was too much to tackle, especially out in the cold, confusing streets. He’d try again. 

“Bobby, let’s go home,” Robbie held out his hand, Bob eventually took it. 

Once they emerged fully streetwise, Bob dropped the hold. Then he wouldn’t walk side by side. And a few streets later he disappeared completely.

Robbie knew where he could find him but he thought it best to leave him be.


	5. 1981

He’d been working with Marty on god knows what, probably nothing? Or the best film idea they’d had yet. They could wrap themselves up in these creative frenzies which was at least partially fueled by procurable substances. Then the phone rang.

“Can you come over?” the voice on the line asked without introducing itself or waiting for recognition.

“Sure Bob, are you in town?” and it must have been so because the line went dead and Robbie couldn’t tell if there was any sort of affirming grunt before that happened.

“I have to—” he started but Marty waved him away saying whatever ideas they had he had to go write down anyway and they’d only get better with time.

He found Bob in the Malibu house which was helpful since any other trip would have been out of the question. He was wandering around, haunting his own house.

“I’m gonna go away for a while, just thought I’d say goodbye.” Bob pulled about ten books at once off a shelf, but having nowhere to put them, he slid them back.

He couldn’t have been back for too long, and he was leaving already? Or had Bob been around and Robbie was too busy to notice? “Where are you going, why?”

Bob looked over at Robbie as if he’d only just remembered calling him. “Mike died.”

Robbie didn’t follow. “Mike who?”

“Bloomfield,” he said it like there couldn’t possibly be another Mike in the world.

At first Robbie thought he didn’t hear, and then he was sure he’d heard him wrong. “Mike Bloomfield died? How?”

Bob didn’t answer him, seemed like there was too much to explain and not enough energy to do so. Or he was afraid he’d break if he tried. Some phone calls between friends later on allowed Robbie to realize it was one of those things that couldn’t be explained. Drug overdose, sure, but to be dumped like that on the side of the road. Alone. Who could do that to another human being?

“Did you and he…” he dropped off, not wanting to offend in the ask but also because a small selfish part of him didn’t want to know while the envy bubbling up inside wanted every detail.

“Think I liked him a lot more than he liked me.” Then he rolled his eyes. “My weakness is talented, unavailable guitarists.”

Shit, who else fit that description? He started to circle in on Clapton but got sidelined by the possibility of Harrison.

He shook it off. “I’m always available.”

Bob snorted, “I’m not looking to fill a gig.”

“I know,” the silence stagnated and he didn’t think he’d ever get out of it. Before the words mired in his blood, he blurted out, “Where do you think you’ll go?”

Bob was staring at a painting he’d probably done. Where the paint was so thick in places it held a texture. And the blues had a way of cutting through you. “Think I’ll stay with my brother, hide out in Minnesota. There everything is frozen.”

“You can fly to Minnesota anytime,” he went to touch him but stopped short. His words a less demanding alternative to don't go and stay with me. “You wanna get high and drunk?”

“Get?” The verbiage threw him.

Close enough to catch his breath, Robbie changed the offer. “Would you like to continue to be high and drunk?”

“There you go,” he clapped him on the shoulder and advanced through the labyrinth of his own house.

The kitchen cabinets revealed a few indiscernible jugs of clear booze. For a second Robbie thought Levon’s kin must have been by, since this seemed like some backwoods moonshine stock. Though Bob was probably content to live and drink without labels, Robbie was better off avoiding the guessing game and sticking with something identifiable and consumable—like wine. Bob surely had that.

He thought about then that he should have offered to make him a sandwich, make sure something went into him. But as he pulled open cupboards and the fridge he found so much was bare that he hoped Bob hadn’t been back for long because every other alternative was frightening.

Back to wine. He found the backstock and pulled a red that didn’t seem to have too much significance with its screw top cap.

He presented the wine to Bob, doing his best sommelier impression, and he was going to go back and find glasses, but Bob snatched up the bottle and drank straight from it and Robbie figured it was best to stop there. Bob pulled out a joint they could pass back and forth.

It wasn’t just being high, when Bob was surrounded by smoke it was like he transformed into an ethereal creature. He talked in shades unseen, divined galaxies of thought, embodied light, air, sound.

It was something Robbie missed in the smokeless times, when Bob seemed constantly on edge. Not with others, but himself. Without that funnel, without freedom, it reminded Robbie how much of Bob was repressed. Like a page torn from his typewriter, undeveloped, unknown.

Bob leaned back on the couch, Robbie next to him but not near. Feeling the creases in the cushions instead of the lines in Bob’s palms.

He might as well mention it. “There’s no food in this house.”

Bob had to think about it a while, the bright flecks in his eyes like ice dissolving in a glass. “Sometimes I wonder if I starve more rich than poor.”

Robbie remembered that feeling of hunger out on the road. Not for knowledge or opportunity, but the unpaid and underfed days. Stealing food from the supermarket, jars of mustard, crusts of bread. Then before that, when he squeaked by with less than dinner at the family table, making friends with families that could feed him. Poverty and its ever advancing rungs of despair was something Robbie could never forget.

“Why, Bobby?” he’d never gotten the answer, he didn’t expect it now.

Turned out to be an easy dodge, Bob shrugged. “I wonder bout a lot of things.” Then he sighed out a ribbon of smoke. “Been trying to think of when I first saw him, I think it was in Chicago in a club of Albert’s. Even then Mike,” the word hurt to say, you could see it fight his mouth. “He uh, he played blues with this deepness, like something you’da dredged outta the Yazoo River. He was so good at what he did, it made my soul ache.”

Bob passed the joint over, Robbie pushed his hand back and let him take another hit as Robbie thought it fit to mention, “I remember seeing him when you guys were doing playback on Like a Rolling Stone, and he cornered me to tell me it was pretty weird, but all cool.”

Bob choked on the smoke and his laughter. “I don’t think he ever understood what I was doing, I don’t think he liked it much either.” He started to wheeze. “And I don’t know as I ranked much higher than that.” He wiped tears back before they fell and smiled through the pain.

Robbie fell back on the only roots he’d ever known, that of the storyteller. He trotted out every Butterfield and Bloomfield story he had, elaborating wherever he could. To make Bob laugh, to make him weep.

Then when it got quiet and the only sound was a dog, likely Bob’s, barking from another room or building, Bob confessed, “All I ever wanted was for those I loved to find it in their hearts to love me too.” Then he stood up abruptly and banged into a coffee table. “Shit, ow. I gotta pack.”

Robbie let him alone for a bit, paralyzed by those words. He should have said something right then to let Bob know he wasn’t as alone as he believed he was. But anything Robbie felt just seemed to get in the way of the realness of Bob.

Robbie got up and cleaned up the mess, when he tossed the wine bottle it fell with a clank that made him realize too many empty bottles were beneath it.

He followed Bob to the bedroom. There was a suitcase open on the bed and clothes were haphazardly thrown in with little reasoning on whether they’d be good for a Minnesota winter.

Robbie came up behind Bob as he was examining two mismatched socks and slid his arms around Bob till he was holding him by the hips and pulled him back against him, one hand traveled down the inside of Bob’s thigh, the other up his chest.

“Did he touch you like this? Did he hold you in his arms and feel you quake?” he gently bit the shell of Bob’s ear.

Bob remained still. “Please don’t toy with my grief.”

“I’m not toying, just want to get your mind off things.” He squeezed him tight and let his hand wander up the zipper of Bob’s pants, then slid down past the waistband, fingering wiry pubic hair and soft, quiet flesh. “You’re leaving for the Midwest. When am I gonna see you again?”

Bob turned toward him, pushing away the hands that loved him and Robbie witnessed the crumbling of an empire in his eyes. “Don’t think I want to be seen for a while.”

Robbie couldn’t let it go. Mike Bloomfield. Opinionated and intense, then smart and soft spoken. With licks that were untamed, so clear and true of a place anyone in The Band would have died to get to. Being around Mike was like witnessing a sentence without spaces or punctuation, everything running together until it was out of steam and off the page. No wonder Bob...

Last he heard Mike was tied up in a shit ton of drugs, and with all Robbie had to live through with Levon, with Rick and Richard...it wasn’t his beat. And really, what right had he to intervene with a sometimes friend, more casual acquaintance? Especially when he felt he hardly had the right with those closer. And then what was he doing, tapped into a never ending conga line of cocaine, acting like it was no big deal? 

But he couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) dwell on that, the real story was what was Bob getting out of Mike that had him so sidelined, or was it that Bob took everything with a solid dose of internal bleeding?

There was something, he alluded to something. Something he didn’t want to let go.

He couldn’t help but imagine the encounter. At first he figured it was a festival fucking, after an electric blast to an unappreciative audience, seeking solace when none was available. Cordial conversation in the woods. Tugging each other off to feel something again, Bob drenched in confusion and anger and a sea of self-loathing when he came.

Or maybe it was in that club or another like it, music pounding and the crowd pressed up in every direction, beer and weed canceling out all the senses. Slamming into a bathroom stall, Bob dropping to his knees, shit and sick staining the tile. He’d have no time to mess around, pretending the experience was new. Instead he’d have to suck him off in a practiced, wanton fashion. His own hand skimming his dick as it bumped up against the zipper of his pants, untouched, unloved. Feeling like he’d been slapped across the face when the stall door hits him on Mike’s quick exit after.

But no, it had to be quieter than that. Incidental action, isolated, alone.

A few furtive touches in the studio, fingers touching on a fretboard, some days having to pass before Mike came around. The whole of it taking place in the back of a car. Every angle uncomfortable as kisses spread like wildfire.

A car, yes that must have been it. Mike died in a car abandoned by love and Bob died in one many years prior when his quest for the same likely ended with a cursory handjob from someone who saw him as the unconventional employer of the day.

Robbie traced his fingers down Bob’s face, along his jaw. “Did he kiss you? Did he love you?”

Bob didn’t let on. “Love is fragile. All my life I scramble after fractured pieces and cut myself on sharp ends.”

No ground was sacred. Bob had to live his life hovering around fellow lost souls, hoping they understood. Wishing they were safe. Maybe Mike kept the secret but Robbie doubted he kept it going.

Who else but Robbie kept him warm at night, touched him, held him, suffered for him, saw him for everything he was and wasn’t and loved him dearly?

Robbie brought his hand up to Bob’s hair and tugged until he’d pulled Bob’s head back so far that he had to look at him. “I’m only going to ask this once. Do you want to forget tonight?”

Bob blinked back some emotion he wasn’t prepared to share and he cleared his throat and said, “Yeah.”

“Good,” Robbie said. “Cause I’m gonna fuck you till the morning comes.”

“Oh good lord,” Bob breathed.

Robbie swept the halfheartedly packed suitcase to the ground and pushed Bob onto the bed, then climbed on top of him. “You okay?”

His sigh reminded Robbie of an umbrella being ripped apart by the wind. “I miss him. I miss you. I miss everything I never had.”

Bob wasn’t going to tell Robbie what he wanted, he wasn’t going to say where things were. Robbie pressed down against him as he fumbled through a nightstand. Coming up with some lube, he dropped it next to them on the bed and went to work on exposing and conquering every inch of Bob.

They’d had funeral sex before. After that plane crash. The less dramatic but equally horrific ones. When random chance or serious addiction brought down those around them. Janis, Hendrix, Tim Hardin. Right before the funeral or just after, fucking to survive. Drawing blood to ensure it hadn’t left them.

This, this felt one-sided, which wasn’t to say Robbie didn’t feel gutted by the loss. More like Bob wasn’t interested in the fight for survival, he aimed for absolute decimation. Robbie should have known it would be like this, Bob always liked to root for the other team.

Touching Bob, feeling him, how he moved and breathed, some of it didn’t match up to the things he’d remembered. Like a glovebox road map he’d unearthed only to find someone else had drawn lines over it.

But maybe that was time. So much had gone by he couldn’t have expected everything to be just as he’d left it. He wondered if Bob ever looked for signs of others on his skin, built into the reserves. Did Bob even care if someone else had been there? Were those the track marks he yearned for? Or was used to?

Robbie pulled him up from the bed and held Bob in his arms, leaned into his skin until he could lay down a scratch take of his heartbeat. “You’re still here, right?”

“No,” Bob sunk into the mattress. “Fuck me into next July.”

Robbie thought through it. “It’s not July now.”

Bob cracked an eye open. “Offer still stands.”

They laughed and the years fell away in an instant. Things made more sense after that.

Gentle touches, naked kisses, lube slick against skin, Robbie pressing inside him. Heat electric, the whole of them together.

Robbie nudged him. “Get on top.”

Bob stayed silent, probably hoping the request wouldn’t be repeated.

“You heard me,” Robbie tugged on Bob’s arm and couldn’t help but laugh.

“Got a fucking broken neck, knees are shit,” he grumbled but still made it there and Robbie helped lower him into position. They started up slow, determined.

Bob closed his eyes and with that sliver of cover could find the strength to move in the directions that most pleased him. And Robbie let him grind away on him, flesh burning hot, hands moving along with the tide—his chest, his neck, tracing veins, clutching muscle. With a fractured whimper riding along Bob’s throat, Robbie whipped his hand through the air and spanked him.

Bob froze. “Oh no,” his eyes wide, he looked off.

“What?” he took hold of Bob’s hips.

He cringed, “I liked it.”

Robbie waited until Bob looked his way and they shared a grin. The hits that followed vibrated through both of them, his hand or Bob’s skin was sure to split.

Robbie sat up and pulled Bob against him, forcing him into his time signature, every movement folding up on each other, turning rough and ragged in explosive heat until Bob could take no more and came over Robbie’s chest and stomach. Robbie pushed Bob back onto the mattress and drove into him while a phantom clawed his flesh and whispered pleas to hold him and never let him go.

Once they were through, Robbie located one of the mismatched socks and wiped himself off with it. Still sticky with sweat and the rest, Bob busied himself by lighting a cigarette and tasted every fraction of smoke.

Robbie pulled on his boxer briefs and went in search of a washcloth. He came back with a warm, damp hand towel and applied it to Bob, rubbing circles across his skin knowing he’d snatch it up any second and smack Robbie over the head with it, only he didn’t. Bob let every moment of it happen.

Robbie loved the openness after. Feeling Bob’s sated skin, body and mind unraveled and pure. Easy to sort through the raw materials then, to witness Bob with no barriers. Early on he only caught snippets and fractions of this time, covering tracks being a high priority. Later when more became accessible, fewer minders and documentarians about, Robbie attempted to stick to the old arrangements. To protect Bob and maybe himself. He didn’t forget how much Bob valued his privacy.

When he was clean enough to be able to set the towel aside, Robbie said, “I know it’s been a while.”

Bob gave the room a double take. “Did I seem out of practice?”

“No I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you, and I guess I didn’t know if the whole…” Shit, he was in too deep already. “Uh...if the holy you would be up for it.”

He frowned. “What is the holy me?”

How could Robbie frame it without being offensive? “Your honor, I’d like to enter into evidence these last few albums.”

“Oh,” he smirked around his cigarette. “That.”

“And?” he didn’t want to be left behind or out of place.

Bob let a lengthy silence go by just to see how Robbie could deal with it. Then he shrugged and said, “Jesus said love one another, why you gotta go further than that?”

Robbie burst out laughing. “That’s good, that’s great to hear. I’ll be sure to remember that.”

He rested his head on Bob’s chest, ran his fingers along the spot of barely-there chest hair stuck near his sternum.

Bob’s hand played through a sonata on Robbie’s spine. “There’s a small group of people who know me, like really know me, I could probably count in one breath. And less of them understand me or what I’m trying to do. And then there’s this...and there’s only you.”

“I—” Robbie started but he didn’t know where to go from there.

Bob moved his hand up to comb Robbie’s hair, the delicate touch tickling Robbie’s scalp in some lazy, erotic fashion. “With Mike gone I feared my memory of that day would be tainted, like all the others Mike and I had. You know the one, the day I saw you and finally understood myself. But now I see the sacred separation and the writing’s clear, branded outta burning coals, that nothing can take us away from each other except the other.”

Robbie looked up at him, desperate to give him the world and coming up with nothing but pocket change. “When you come back, I’ll be here for whatever you need. You want a guitarist, you want a friend, you want something else, I'm available.” It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. “And call when you’re up there, okay? When you’re cold, I’ll keep you warm.”

When he left not too long after with nothing more than an eyebrow raise from Bob as thanks, he got to thinking why didn’t Robbie ask him to stay? Why didn’t he tell him he loved him? Did he ever really say that to him? Well, it was understood. Bob always had a fine tuned ear for subtext. But in this case, with guts and wires exposed, did he need the words Robbie forgot to give him?

Robbie thought about it for a while, and he thought about how no one could get Bob to stay in one place anyway, and then there was the image of the day that refused to go away—not of Mike and Bob, but of Bob pulling back on Robbie’s hand as he went to leave. Wanting him to stay, but not strong enough to ask for it. What Robbie didn’t have to do but did anyway was pretend it was a handshake and continue on out the door to get back to his own life. 

He couldn’t explain to himself why he had done that, and he kept replaying it through as he made his way back home, no love had diminished but he was missing the desire to return to Bob’s side. Maybe he never had it. Once he was back with Marty, a few hits of Columbian marching powder made it all disappear and he soon forgot that he’d left home at all.


	6. 1983

Robbie had no business being in that recording studio, bad enough there was another guy named Robbie floating around playing for Bob. He thought maybe Bob’s invitation meant he’d sit in for a session, and then politely beg off just to listen, but when he arrived everybody seemed to be packing up.

He exchanged hellos with most of them as they made their way out the door. They wanted to know what he was up to and he talked a bit about the film he was doing with Marty, when they asked what it was about he’d said it was about the dark side of fame and the easy counter lobbed back was, “Is there a light side?”

“It’s actually a great piece of film,” Robbie went on. “It’s kind of one man’s obsession with another, how he thinks he wants exactly what the other guy has: fame, power, talent most of all. And then as the film goes on you realize so much rage has built up inside him, that as much as he says he idolizes the other man, it turns out he wants to destroy him.”

Somewhere in all of that Bob had wandered up behind him, hands in his pockets, and was giving him an odd look. Finally he went, “Comedy, right?”

“Something like that,” Robbie answered.

When he turned back to check the door, he found everyone else had rung off for the night. Far off waves leaving him behind. Bob had left him too and was tooling around on his own in the studio.

Robbie approached him, wariness rushing his heart. He had to treat it like he was walking into the coliseum, a meal for lions till he knew better.

Bob wasn’t in the business of giving hints. He went back to tap some Morse code through at the soundboard.

“This yours or Mark’s?” he held up a guitar. Bob didn’t answer, Robbie put it down.

“Hey, how’s this sound?” Bob slid back behind an upright piano and started this slow, soulful pounding. He gave him a nod and Robbie drifted to an amp where he sat and listened for a bit, and when words trickled out of Bob, lyrics that befit an old dusty road just uncovered, Robbie switched the amp on and played along on the connected guitar.

Felt like a knife twisting, exposing some forgotten memory of the blues from a rusted out shack in the woods of Georgia. How did he get there? How did Bob work Blind Willie McTell over an opus he’d never had and still make it feel like he’d stolen the song sheet out from under him? Why did Robbie feel an iron weight hammering down his heartstrings and think how much of a shame it was that he wasn’t hearing Nina Simone singing it this instant. Bessie Smith. Ma and Louis.

Bob finished the song, notes still echoing in Robbie’s ear and he went to flick a few switches on the soundboard to turn off the recording.

Robbie had to think it all over. Some freight train of the past had just cut right through him. How on Planet Waves Bob took him by the shirttail and they played quiet, alone, for what ended up being called Dirge, and it was a beautiful, tortured song but it also felt so much like a part of them that he wanted to hit Bob in the mouth right then and there and hear how it was all made up, watch blood trickle down the side of his lip as Bob tongued it, devouring every inch of raw pain. 

Don’t be me, but don’t be someone else was where Robbie's brain was torn and in the end he only managed to say, “Well that’s a statement piece,” and Bob turned off the recording and didn’t really speak again until they were back out on the street where he said, “I’d never hurt you like that, you’ve never hurt me. Not once.” And it didn’t answer every question that he had but he couldn’t expect that from Bob.

Bob came back from the other side of the recording booth. “Now don’t be waitin’ on any album royalties, that one’s just for me.”

“St James Infirmary, right?” Robbie replaced the guitar in its stand. “Gambler’s Blues?”

He wouldn’t commit to the credit, “Mm.”

It struck Robbie that this was the kind of melody, a bastardized homage that would have made Mike Bloomfield flinch or fall in love. He would have said just that but feared the loss was still too raw, or that he’d stumble on the truth on why the song was floating about.

“A hidden reference, huh?” Robbie stood back up and felt that magnetic pull bring him closer to Bob. “You didn’t let me in on your secret.”

Bob came back around the piano and shrugged. “Wanted to see where you’d get without knowing for sure.”

“You,” Robbie grabbed hold of Bob’s chin to give him a playful shake and Bob followed it straight into a kiss because he knew nothing better.

There was something else to that kiss, a force he hadn’t known. Asking him to tumble and fall from someone who hadn’t the strength to push.

Dreams, Bob had said once (Robbie was sure), represented what one wanted when the want remained unknown. So what happened when it became known? Knowledge, awareness spreading in a rapidly darkening wound.

Bob broke the kiss and looked up at Robbie, heat in his eyes, thunder at the ready.

“Be with me,” he said.

“What’s that?” Robbie took a step back.

Bob didn’t let him get too far. “Be only with me, we could make up for lost time.”

How had this never come up? Because there was never a possibility. Certainly he should have imagined it, but that all felt erased. Been left on the board too long, someone was bound to take it down.

This was why he’d been asked here. Now he was cornered, at cross-purposes, in a battle he’d hate to win.

He tried to keep it soft, friendly. “Bob—”

He wasn’t hearing him, or he was but didn’t want to. “But wait, you gotta listen to the whole verse before jumping to the chorus.”

“But I know the tune, Bobby. You love to tour, and it’s not the road. It’s the show, it’s the theater, it’s the night. It’s the life and the light it gives you and I’m done with all of that. I can’t tour, I won’t tour. And I won’t tag along to be in the Rat Pack.”

Bob tried to find a way around it. “So you stay here then. And we—”

“No, Bobby.” his voice dropped even lower.

What they had, whatever it was, worked with space and time stretching through them. Connections ablaze when together, fires dimly burning when apart. Bob surely knew that, he was just as in love with romance as he was with heartache. Wasn’t he?

“Why not? If there’s love, then why not?” he’d been through far too many rounds, but the fight was still in him.

How could Robbie explain that he wanted to be there but not with? Come around but not wait? He couldn’t be everything to the man who already was.

“We’re,” it already sounded off-key. “Bob, we’re different people. And I know you’re on like the eighth or ninth version of you and I love you just the same, but what you’re trying to do won’t work.”

“But that’s it, I want to try.” his arms spread wide, hoping he could slow the train by laying down in front of it. “Can’t you see, I’m not afraid anymore. There’s no one here who can hold me back.”

Robbie waited for Bob’s arms to drop, he waited for time to run out, hoping, wildly hoping he wasn’t going to have to be the one to say it. But he said it.

Robbie’s voice strangled in his throat. “Just me.”

The cruel realization washed over him. “There only ever was you.”

Shutdown complete, switch permanently affixed. Feet seemed to move independently of his body. Bob made it to the door, hands brushing along a few instruments on the way. For a moment he clutched a harmonica, but decided he didn’t need that either.

The room already felt colder, things sealed off so quickly. Robbie couldn’t think of what to say anymore, all talk had fallen off a cliff. And feeling the complete devastation of turning out the only man who’d ever called him home, he cried out, too far after the fact, “Sorry.”

Bob stopped at the door, he didn’t look back. “I already was.”


	7. 1974

Before Bob got up, before he went to the window, they were tangled in each other. Bodies warm, relaxed in the mist of the night, gently spiraling toward sleep.

He hardly ever backtracked with Bob, the past, even an hour’s past was history, man, and not something Bob was interested in revisiting. But something about it struck Robbie as significant and he needed to know.

“Hey,” he blew a breath along Bob’s eyelashes. When he didn’t stir, he forged ahead alone. “You said sorry on the plane, what were you sorry for?”

“Hm?” one eye of Bob’s fluttered open and then closed.

The urgency for the answer started to exhaust Robbie and the hope for any response at all turned fatal. His voice grew louder. “I know it wasn’t about getting my last cigarette. So what were you sorry for? Bobby?”

Bob smiled through his sleep and Robbie swore he could feel the warmth. Oh, it was like that. He was the tender churning of the heart.

Bob touched Robbie’s ear, rolled the skin between his fingers and mumbled, “I’m sorry I can’t love you the way that I want to. Hold you in my arms and never let go. Call you mine and keep you at my side. Kiss you every time my heart leaps and feel no shame. You deserve the fullest kind of love, nothing hidden or polluted. The real thing.” And he faded away.

“You’ve always been the real thing to me,” Robbie whispered and squeezed him tight as Bob drifted off to dreamland.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man okay, thanks for reading! Title pulled from lyrics of Black Diamond Bay. Rest pulled from my brain.


End file.
